---
id: governance
title: Governance
---
The Diem Association is a member-based association dedicated to building a blockchain-based payment system that supports financial innovation, inclusion, and integrity.

## Diem Improvement Proposals (DIP)

Diem Improvement Proposals (DIPs) offer the Diem developer community a way to participate in advancing the features and functioning of the Diem payment network (DPN), either by proposing a change or engaging in discussion about a proposal. Learn more about how DIPs work [here](https://dip.diem.com/overview). You can also view the current list of [all DIPs](https://dip.diem.com/all-dips).

## Technical Steering Committee

The [Technical Steering Committee (TSC)](https://www.diem.com/en-us/about-us/#technical_steering_committee) comprises members who supervise technical design and development of the Diem Blockchain.

Appointed by the Council, the TSC is comprised of representatives from Member organizations who are tasked with advising on the technical design and development of the Diem network.

## Maintainers

#### Dahlia Malkhi, Diem Association & Diem Networks US ‒ Lead Maintainer
Dahlia Malkhi is the Chief Technology Officer at the Diem Association and Diem Networks US, an applied and foundational researcher in distributed systems technology, author, and international speaker. She co-invented HotStuff, which the Diem Blockchain core (DiemBFT) is based on.

Previously, she co-founded VMWare Blockchain, co-invented Flexible Paxos, the technology behind Log Device, and created CorfuDB, a database-less database driving VMware’s NSX-T distributed control plane. She has also worked as the technical lead of VMWare Blockchain and CorfuDB. Dahlia is a former associate professor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, from where she holds a Ph.D. in computer science.

#### Sam Blackshear, Move and MoveVM – Maintainer
Sam Blackshear is a research scientist at Novi. He is a co-creator of Move and works on the Move standard library and virtual machine.

Previously, he worked on the Infer static analyzer and earned a Ph.D. from the University of Colorado, Boulder.

#### Avery Ching, Consensus and Networking – Maintainer
Avery Ching currently leads the consensus, networking, and performance efforts in Diem. He co-created the DiemBFT consensus protocol that ensures safety and liveness in the Diem Blockchain.

Previously, he was the technical lead across multiple “big compute” teams at Facebook, including Spark, graph processing, Hive/Hadoop, and batch scheduling. He co-created Apache Giraph. Avery has a Ph.D. in high-performance computing from Northwestern University.

#### Kevin Hurley, Admission Control and Mempool – Maintainer
Kevin Hurley is the Novi technical lead across several core Diem areas such as client service, mempool, off-chain APIs, and node synchronization.

Previously, he was the software architect and technical lead of Facebook Payments. Kevin has a Bsc in electrical engineering from Bradley University.

#### Daniel Prinz, First Group – Maintainer, Payments
Daniel Prinz is the CTO of First Digital Assets Group. He leads teams building a payment platform for merchants to accept Diem Coins, and blockchain tools and APIs for developers using the Diem Blockchain.

Previously, Daniel was the CTO of the Cyber Division in the Israeli Secret Service, and a Software Architect at SAP and Applied Materials. He has a BSc from Bar-Ilan University in computer science.

#### David Wolinsky, TCB, Configuration, Crypto – Maintainer
David Wolinsky currently leads the security-infrastructure effort and co-leads networking efforts. He co-created the security architecture that ensures safety in the Diem Blockchain.

He recently led a DARPA-funded project on provable, scalable anonymous communication at Yale. David has a Ph.D. in building reliable, decentralized peer-to-peer networks from the University of Florida.

#### Andrew Baine – Manager, Protocols Team, Bison Trails – Production Maintainer
Andrew Baine is a Manager at Bison Trails on the Protocols team. He leads the team responsible for launching, operating, and upgrading nodes on Tendermint, HotStuff, Algorand, Bitcoin, and related networks. He is the lead developer and architect for Bison Trails Diem Validator clusters.

Andrew has been at Bison Trails for two years, and along with the other early engineers at Bison Trails, designed and implemented the go-to-market version of Bison Trails’ cluster management platform.

#### Young Yang Liauw, Novi – Production Maintainer
Young is a technical lead for Developer Infrastructure at Novi. He works on the software development life cycle, developer experience, and Diem Ecosystem integration.

Previously, he has been the technical lead and engineering manager across compiler and release engineering teams at Facebook. He was a researcher at Stanford University where he co-led a DARPA-funded project in non-volatile reconfigurable computing. He holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University.

#### Sherry Xiao, Novi – Production Maintainer
Sherry Xiao is a Production Engineer at Novi and has been leading the production readiness effort for the Diem Blockchain across several areas such as observability, debuggability, disaster recovery readiness, and incident response procedure.

Previously, she has been the technical lead for Instagram’s “Infrastructure as a Service” initiative, and worked on scaling the Instagram web server fleet and Cassandra clusters. Sherry holds a master degree in computer science from Temple University.
